1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a process and an apparatus for activating a biological material. More specifically, the present invention relates to a process for activating a biological material comprising immobilizing a biological material to a porous material and heating the structure body at the optimal temperature and above of the biological material thereby activating the biological material immobilized in the porous material.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally, a biological material exemplified by a protein such as an enzyme exhibits only lower activity at a temperature exceeding the optimal temperature than the activity at the optimal temperature of the biological material, at which the biological material can develop the function most adequately. It is also known that when a biological material is exposed to a temperature not lower than a certain temperature, it loses the activity due to the changes of the spacial configuration. The temperature of such heat inactivation is different among the kinds of protein, but the activity tends to be inactivated when heated to around 50° C. in the case of proteins having the optimal temperature at or around room temperature. Proteins stable at high temperatures are also known, and generally, such heat-resistant proteins have higher optimal temperatures.
Conditions of higher temperature should be often used depending on the conditions to be used for each protein. In such cases, it is common to use heat-resistant proteins as mentioned above. However, there are cases that heat resistance is not known or the heat resistance, even if it is known, does not meet the conditions to be used. Various kinds of methods have been conventionally studied to handle such proteins easily as well as stably. One of these methods includes supporting a protein on the solid surface, and can be exemplified by the technology which has been put to practical use by immobilizing enzymes and the like.
Various materials such as silica produced by sol-gel method, fused quartz, porous inorganic materials, porous organic polymer materials are used for immobilizing a biological material such as protein. In late years immobilization on mesoporous materials formed with molecular assembly of surfactant as a mold, particularly mesoporous silica has been proposed. Such technique is described in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Nos. 2000-139459 and 2002-095471. Effects such as improvement in the collection ratio and heat-resistance of enzyme by using these various kinds of immobilization methods have been reported.
The immobilization method mentioned above limits the degree of freedom of the protein structure since it immobilizes proteins on the surface or the inside of a solid. Accordingly there was a problem that activity per protein molecule is extremely low compared with proteins in a buffer solution in which they have higher degree of freedom. Methods to stabilize proteins against heat include a method of synthesizing a protein having a high optimal temperature while genetically introducing a variation to, but it is a technique only known for extremely limited kinds of proteins and is not applicable to various kinds of proteins.
The present invention has been achieved in view of the above-mentioned problems and an object thereof is to provide a process and an apparatus for effectively activating a biological material such as a protein.